Tag Archives: funny

Jabber Box features the text to speech and alarm manager services in Android powered mobile devices. Create text messages to play back as speech in the form of a reminder at a specific time. Save many similar messages in a common category or group and play the whole group in a random order for laughs and entertainment.

With you as a creator, the possibilities are endless as your imagination. Like hiding your phone or tablet along with a birthday gift for a five yer old. Jabber Box can make a fun game of giving the birthday child clues to search for and find the hidden gift.

I had been experimenting with the Google Text to Speech capabilities on Android mobile devices lately and wound up putting together an application purely for fun. Once I implemented a feature to turn text into audible speech at a scheduled time, I realized I had also created something potentially quite useful too!

I am a single guy and I occasionally go out with single women I don’t know very well. Well, a situation came up (while I was working on what I had started to call the Say This app), where I was going to take a local cowgirl out for some Texas country dancing. I didn’t know her very well and had never seen her dance. I wasn’t excited about the feeling of getting stuck in an uncomfortable situation for me. I created a fake message in Say This for use later on if I needed to.

After I picked her up, there was still a 30 minute drive to get to the club for drinking and dancing to a live band. So we talked along the way getting to know each other. When she began mentioning some things about her steadfast beliefs, I knew right then I was doomed if I should ever slip across her boundaries.

So I told myself to keep my opinions to myself and perhaps we can just have some good time dancing to loud live music. Not much talking.

It turned out that we were not good dance partners at all. Country two-step dancing is a close contact sport. Contact best applied with tenderness and some finess. I am used to taking a strong lead with timid dancers or following the rhythm of a strong dancer so we sync up. Both strategies were just not gelling with this cute little cowgirl.

She had no sense of rhythm! I blame it on her incessant jibber jabber the whole time I was within earshot. Including the dance floor. So I decided to cut the evening short so we could remain friends.

After the second dance, we each went to our respective restrooms and I took advantage of being out of sight by loading up the message I had created earlier. I scheduled it to play 10 minutes later with full volume due to the live music.

Then the message played…

“You have a new message from: Roberts County Sheriff’s Department.

Dusty, this is deputy Sublett, You have a fence break on Quarterhorse Road and there are about 25 head out already and could be more. How soon can you get out here?”

She looked at me straight in my eyes and said, “You need to go!” The two cowboys sitting with us at the table (mutual friends) immediately offered their help with the roundup and fence mend. But I asked my date if she minded letting them take her home.

Everyone at the table seemed to be happy with that solution. And I mean everyone including me.

On the way home, I got to thinking about my app and how useful it turned out to be. I had been thinking it would just be a fun prankish sort of entertainment app.

I decided to dedicate the new app to the cute chatty cowgirl with no rhythm and change the name to Jabber Box. ha!